Juli 7th, 2015 von buergermeister

I will do in November a new event about Free Software graphic tools – FOSSOGRAPHY. This event plans to bring developer and user of this software together. Its thought of a kind of showcase about the newest developments in this areas and what can be done with free software. The projects shall win this way new users as even more contributors.
But it shall be also a place where the various programmers of the different projects can meet and connect to work on stuff where the programs should be working together. But also a place where you can come and tell people about an idea you have that might get software in this area improved.

The Call for Papers as well the registration for the event is open now and closes on 30th September. We search for talks, handout sessions, workshops, hackfest from the following areas:

Open Source and photographics

Free Software tools for image manipulation and raw development

3D graphics and renderer

Free Software for vector graphics

Font design with Open Source

Free Software tools for 2D & 3D animation

Video editing and production with Open Source

Game development and asset creation with Open Source

UX design in/for and with Open Source

Desktop publishing and print design with FreeSoftware

Open Source 3D printing soft- and hardware

Open Source Color Management

Aerial photography and video with Open Source

DIY (open source) dolly systems

File formats for free graphic software

The idea to this evnet, was born a long time ago as another event who looks wants the same doesnt become what it should be.
After the decision was made to do it was open the place where it should be and there was a lot of thinking if it is a good idea to go first time to Asia. Yeah there are some disadvantages, like working style of Asians or the most Europeans/Americans think flying there would be more expensive as travelling inside Europe or the the amount of FOSS contributors isnt that high on this continent. But at a certain point we as free software movement have to go to Asia to get them involved and not always saying, we dont have contributors there!

But there is something else, we have to carry the costs for the event, where is actually a positive thing doing it in Asia as that gets amazingly cheap as well we want to support speakers and projects with there travel costs. We try to collect most of this money from the community, so if you believe in the goal of the event and/or using this tools, you can help us. We made a pledgie for that purpose and an indiegogo campaign will follow. But watch we want to give you something in return!

Juli 1st, 2015 von buergermeister

I was last week in Pune for FUDCon, so its time to write about the experiences.

Day -2

I had to start my travel 2 days before the event from airport Leipzig flying to Munich, well the travel to Leipzig and also the checkin and flight was without something to mention. Just one hour ride to Leipzig and 40 minutes flight to Munich. I had a long layover in Munich so I checked before the situation with WIFI and electricity, well Munich has free wifi and they even proudly anounced that the equipped the gate areas with power supply, well they was there but simple not working. With a little searching I found one which was working but there was nothing to sit there so I spent the time in EMEA Ambassadors meeting standing

Day -1

Also for that day there was no action, boarding the plane in the morning and leaving it in Mumbai in the night. The immigration process with the TVOA visa worked well, except to find the counter for them was difficult. So if you travel to India and eligible to get it, thats the easiest way.
Outside the airport Prima Yogi Loviniltra and a volunteer did already wait for me, just Ryan Lerch was missing but he joined as a few minutes later. So the fetch on the airport was well organized. The cab ride took some time but interesting conversations made that not feelable. So we arrived in the morning in Pune just enough for 3 hours sleep.

Day 0

I had not really time for a good breakfast but I needed one as I had not a dinner either, but Kushal was already standing there telling me I was to late. But I managed to grab something to eat even the waiter always removed my tools when I grabbed something. Also here the transport was well organized and the bus for bringing us to MIT was already waiting.
On the first day I joined a few sessions but I will write only something about the most important for me. We had a BoF session for the next APAC FUDCon. What I am worried about is the style which is coming up there, just finding some point why a thing not might be good instead of trying to find out how problems can be solved!

Day 1

I started the day with Jiri Eischmanns presentation about the Fedora workstation and his presence and future. I joined several other talks to, where I just want to mention the Achieving Community Goals With Fedora one from Tenzin Chokden, awesome job of Joerg Simon and Fabian Affolter and their l10n hackfest for the tibetian language, good work. Besides that I had many organizational conversations for organzing stuff in the APAC region.

Day 2

This was actually the most busy day for me as I had in the morning my own workshop about using Inkscape. Well there are some negative things, the room was not the best choice, its hard to work on a small table attached to the chair. But more worst was that the picture from projector was looped to an camera, but the camera was missing so we had to find that out first, so I lost some time for the workshop. But we still managed to draw with the participants what I wanted to achieve and they have a good foundation to use Inkscape in their work and learn it more. I already prepared a screencast, which you can find here.

Ryan switched more to a presentation style, which I only do on events to impress people what with our free software tools can be done and how easy it can be. But as I expect people on a FOSS event like FUDCon are already open to using our tools and just need some help starting to work with them and the best way to learn it is by doing.

After the lunch we had another Ambassadors BoF for APAC, time to speak more Ambassador stuff. We made during this year some progress in APAC and on FUDCon it was visible a lot of asians in a Fedora Ambassador shirts, but we still have not all equipped with them.

We also made progress in producing F21 media centralized but still there are some problems to solve as the process didnt work well, we had no central production in APAC for F22 but we talked how we shall do it in the future and think found the best solution for it. We also had time to discuss if it would possible to replace the DVD media at least partly with USB sticks. We agreed on doing a research on prices until next FAD APAC end of the year and look there if we do it or not. And yes we found an place where we want to do the next FAD – Singapore so we will work on it during the next months to organize it. So we moved again forward.

Day 3

Some went out really in the morning to spent some time in Mumbai, but I am to old for touristic pressure even I would like to have seen more from that city, I was in India for FUDCon and not for an touristic tour. So I went out of the hotel at noon and the cab brought me to the airport, where I enjoyed the sun outside and later I spent some time with Danishka Naven and Izhar Firdaus in the airport.

Day 4

This day I entered a plane in Mumbai short after the day had begun and woke up landing in Zurich. Well I found easily an AC port in this airport and free wifi was also available so I could do some work during the time I had to wait for the next flight, wich was this time just 5 hours later. After this flight I just had a short trip with the train and I arrived right in time for the Design Team meeting.

Summary

It was an interesting trip to India seeing how people live there and make new friends, meeting people I worked already with and meeting old friends. I think we moved for the Ambassadors in the APAC region and that means Fedora makes progress in the future in Asia.

Juni 15th, 2015 von buergermeister

Mai 11th, 2015 von buergermeister

As all the last year in May the event row called Linuxwochen makes it stop in Vienna and I represented Fedora there. This year it was an special event as the Linuxwochen could celebrate their 15th anniversary. And this years event was indeed special, normally this event is compared to others a smaller one as it is from Thursday to Saturday. But this year it was on Thursday already crowded and it looked some more Germans have found their way to Vienna. Also both of the workshop I gave in Vienna was an success and as always filled with people.
Personally I think the exhibition area was this year a nice one to, as Axiom Apertus Beta was presented there, first that this open source camera was presented in public and also Mozilla did show an TV running Firefox (an TV that you can buy, greetings to Ubuntu).
The social event was this year also a nice one, with an special delicious cake. So it was all in all a win to been there personally as for Fedora.

April 29th, 2015 von buergermeister

Next week there will be the austrian road show called Linuxwochen make its station in Vienna and Fedora will be present. We will have of course an booth there and I will deliver also 2 workshops, one for Inkscape and one for Blender. You find the full schedule with all talks and workshops here.

März 24th, 2015 von buergermeister

Last weekend there was Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, after the dead of LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany’s largest event around Linux and Open Source. I got to this event since the begin and it was like always a lot of visitors, even it was a little bit lsser this year as the years before. I had this year als only one talk, together with Robert Scheck.

So I had more time for conversations and the booth, which was as always good vistited. We did as the last 3 years also present an 3D printer but we was not the only ones, s time for a new idea. But the people have still interest in it. So we had a lot of conversations an handed out a lot of DVD and stickers.

P.S. if another Fedora Ambassador needs the slides, they can be found here

März 20th, 2015 von buergermeister

The submission phase for Fedora 22 Supplemenal Wallpaper is now over and the voting is open. You can vote, if yu have an Fedora account cla +1 until 25th of March. Dont forget to claim the badge, the link for the claim will be showed after the voting. But nw is als time to say something to the submissions, we received this time not a lot, that might be because of the shortage of the submission phase. We got 69 submissions thats half of the last one. Unfortunately I had to deny a lot of them because persons or trademarks on them or wrong format. The quality of the submissions is this time als not that good, a lot of our good photographers did nt submit something. Personally I find it hard to find 16 amngst the submissions, tht would be worthy to gt packaged. But this are my personally favorites:

Februar 23rd, 2015 von buergermeister

Time is flying, Fedora 21 is there just 2 months and Fedora 22 alpha is before the door. So it is time to open the Supplemental Wallpaper Contest. We will use again Nuancier Fedoras application fr the submission and the voting. There are also this time some changes, there is now a team of mentors, who look over the submissions and make suggestions how it can be improved. The submission phase is this time much much shorter, you have only until 19th of March to make your submission.

There are some rules of technical nature:

Submitted wallpapers must use a format that can be read by software available in Fedora Package Collection. Preferred image formats include SVG and PNG.

Master files, which may be further edited, should be maintained in non-lossy formats. Preserving vector graphics, raster layers, and channels is important for such materials.

Originals for landscape formats must be a minimum of 1600 pixels wide and 1200 pixels high. The larger the better. Photographic submissions should be made at the highest resolution the camera is capable of.

Submitted wallpapers should be provided in a 16 x 9 aspect ratio when possible.

No watermarks, signatures, photographer/creator names, or messages may be included in any part of the work. However if the license allows, and the photo is compelling enough, we could remove watermarks.

and some of organizational nature:

Submissions must not contain material that violates or infringes anothers rights, including but not limited to privacy, publicity or intellectual property rights, or that constitutes copyright infringement. If your submissions include or derive from artwork created by other people, please make sure the license of the original work you incorporate is compatible with Fedora and that you are not violating any of the provisions of its license. Just because a work is licensed with a Creative Commons license does not mean it is free to use (make sure you provide attribution to artists that license their work with a CC Attribution clause.)

Submission should have the consent and approval of the author or creator

Submissions re thereby licensed to the public for reuse under CC-BY-SA unless specifically identified as being licensed by another approved liberal open source license. See a list of approved licenses for Fedora. Note that we can not accept NC or ND submissions.

To get inspiration, you can always look on former submissions, that are my personal favorites from the last contest:

The deadline until you can submit your artwork is the March 19 2015 at 23:59 UTC. The voting will open automatically after this deadline and as many said the period for the voting shall be longer it will be this time open until 25th of March

For the badges hunters, yes there will be badges for it. There will be a badge for submissions, it will be awarded after the examination of the picture if it fits the rules, which you can see above. Another one will be awarded if your submission is chosen and also for the voting process there will be one. So successful submission makes 2 badges For further questions, you can send me a mail and don’t hesitate to ask me for assistance just write me a mail gnokii@fedoraproject.org.

Februar 11th, 2015 von buergermeister

It’s some time now that I was in Westford for the Design Team FAD, it was great and we achieved a lot during this weekend. We came down to 17 open tickets for the Design Team and discussed how we will work in the future. The only thing what wasnt that nice is the flying time, I was really jetlagged after the return and additionally I fetched a nice cold which brought me down for more then a week. So I was a little bit down for nearly 3 weeks, but now I am back but I have so many mails to read and answer that it will be my work for the next 3 days.

Next station will be the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, where I will have together with Robert Scheck an talk. Next to that I have to arrange the Linuxwochen in Vienna, which have also started their CfP. So if somebody wants to help me on the booth…. and there is also some work to do for Fossography in November. So a lot of work waits for me.

Dezember 1st, 2014 von buergermeister

I am home now since a few days, time to look back and do a wrap-up, what I have done during my days in Cambodia. My schedule was really packed and I was tired on the last days. Next time I will plan a day off, for recreation.

I think I moved a lot in Phnom Penh, Fedora becomes more and more known and we also find more and more friends there. The Fedora community in Cambodia is growing. But there was also moved a lot for APAC region during FAD, they have a budget plan now for next year, Ambassador Shirts are rolling and some things more….

November 26th, 2014 von buergermeister

On the last weekend there was another Fedora Join Workshop planned and it didnt turn out that well this time, as there was only 4 participants who wanted to know more about Fedora as starting to contribute to Fedora. So I had to switch to introduce them to Fedora instead, well that’s my job as Fedora Ambassador. So I showed them as many as I could and explained a lot and answered all their questions and after 4 hours we finished this little session. But this meant no free time for me, as some saw I might have some free time, they asked me for an fast workshop for Blender so I ended up giving another Blender workshop in Development Innovations 5D Lab, which was fun. So I fetched lesser contributors this time but that is fine, helping people in their start using Fedora is also fine and sooner or later they can be transformed into contributors.

November 24th, 2014 von buergermeister

On friday evening I had another OpenMovieNight, this time in Phnom Penh again at Development Innovations. It turned out as a good event we had around 40 participants and after an short talk about copyright, creative commons licenses, open source and free software, we had a lot of fun with the 33 movies I had chosen for the show.

As some already asked in IRC here is the complete list of movies I presented:

November 21st, 2014 von buergermeister

I had yesterday the opportunity to give an Inkscape workshop at Development Innovations Cambodia in Phnom Penh. The participatns was only from several NGO’s, so called multiplicators and it turned out great. One day isnt that much time, to learn enough about Inkscape to use it in a professional way, but you can get at least the foundations to use it and learn more by yourself. But we had a lot of fun together and there was really some talented people amongst the 23 participants and the best two of them had already Fedora stickers on their laptop, so Open Source community in Cambodia begins to grow.

November 20th, 2014 von buergermeister

I am still in Cambodia and after FAD I had on monday and tuesday an workshop about open source graphic tools at Smallworld Cambodia. It was great as always I like being there, its a nice place and its really nice to see how this young people organize to get an better education. The workshop was really good and there was really talented people amongst the particiants. I even managed to help one to install an Fedora on his laptop. The only thing bad was, that my tuesday morning started not so nice with being fetched in the elevator but I was still on time at the place.

So Fedora found again more friends in Cambodia, it might need time to get them to contributors but I have hope for it. At least they start using more and more free software and thats a good thing.

November 19th, 2014 von buergermeister

FAD APAC 2014, the first of its kind eneded already 3 days ago and I was not enabled to write an report until yet, as I am still in Phnom Penh and have each day a workload to do, with giving workshops, talks and meetings. But now its the time, Siddesh has already pushed out for each day ( day 0, 1 and 2) a nice summary, what things we have done. But here a short summary:

Day 1: this day, we started with me giving an overview as an outsider what I see are the problems of the APAC regions and then everybody had the opportunity to give us an inside view to his country. The rest of the day we spent with planning the budget for next year. I putted together with the help of other people an “asian event” page in our wiki, which we used to plan the budget. It was really a lot of work and the day ended really late, we stood in the DAI offices until past 7pm. So we was really late for dinner, which was definitely nice – to sad for me, to much fish and seafood.

Day 2: We used this day to finish the work on the event planning and then moved over to more problematic topics like production of swag. Thats a little bit more complicated here as I am used to in EMEA, but there is room for improvements, so we talked about the really needed swag, which should be easily accessible for the Ambassadors in the APAC region and how to produce it with good and acceptable prices, we also had to talk about how we deal with the reimbursements for some Ambassadors as transaction fees are to high, I think Siddesh explained it very well in one of his posts, the money value is here in a lot of countries another one, take Cambodia e.g. We came up with some ideas where we can improve but mainly they have to improve there organization how to deal with the costs.

I think this FAD was definitely progress for the APAC Ambassadors and we will see what it brings in the future. But we suceeded not only with the topics of FAD, we had also another thing. As I was here in February/March and gave some talks and awarded gifts for questions the session chair wanted to award some things to people who was Fedora Ambassadors. Why the was not visible as such ones, no Fedora shirt! There was several attempts to produce the same Fedora Ambassadors Shirts as we have in EMEA but it never progressed, but now its done. All the participants took home the shirts for the Ambassadors in their countries, with the list we have we already equipped 40% of the Ambassadors we have with an shirt. For the rest, well if we would know there size……. But look for the anouncement in the next APAC meeting.

November 16th, 2014 von buergermeister

On friday we had here in Phnom Penh, Release Party for Fedora 21. Yes we know 21 isnt released yet, but we started back in May organizing this event and now at least beta is available and we could show the features. Here in Cambodia just a few people are introduced to Linux and Open Source so Release Party is more to get them and inform them about it, as introducing them to the features of the newest version. But we had a great party, we had around 70 visitors and during the talks a lot of questions. We found definitely new friends in Cambodia and some also are willing to do something for Fedora, so lets see how the “Join Fedora Workshop” turns out next weekend.

But we have also to say thx to some people here and there is in the first place Greta Greathouse from US AID – Development Innovations, who not only gave us the space for the party as also prepared us a really nice food and drinks, so that it became a really nice party after the talks.

November 2nd, 2014 von buergermeister

This November will be a busy month for me, I will fly to Cambodia again and bring some Fedora energy there. Its my second visit to this country and I look forward to it. I will have an talk at Royal University of Phnom Penh. RUPP is using Fedora for teaching there students basic skills for Linux. But as always, its teached more about technical stuff as what Linux or Fedora really is, projects driven by volunteers. RUPP gives me the great opportunity to speak to all there IT students about how they can contribute to Fedora and learn even more by doing so. But I will do some other things more.

On 14th of November I will join the Fedora Release Party Phnom Penh and help Somvannda Kong and Nisa Ban by giving an talk at this event. Truong Anh Tuan is giving another one. So it looks there will be an interesting program with talks and fun. Yes, Fedora 21 will not be released that day, but Beta will be available at least and we can show the features of the upcoming version.

On 15th of November I will help in the morning Somvannda in preparing the packaging workshop, which will be done that day remotely by Robert Scheck. So we will help the attendees to install all the necessary software for the workshop so that Robert can start without being enforced to take care of that.

The rest of November 15th and 16th I will join the FAD APAC, where the activities for the next year will be planned.

17th and 18th of November I will deliver a 3 days workshop at Smallworld Cambodia, about doing Graphics with Free Software tools.

20th of November I will be back at Development Innovations for delivering an Inkscape workshop to attendees from several NGO’s

21st of November I doing an Open Movie Night at the same place, talking about free software and free culture and of course showing some examples what can be done with free software.

September 2nd, 2014 von buergermeister

9th FrOSCon took its place on 23rd and 24th of August, it was my 8th time I did visit that event. I was for the whole weekend at the Fedora booth, I brought from Flock enough media and swag for the event. I also transported again the rollup through the train, which is hard as I have to change the train several times and together with swag its a lot to carry. Christoph brought also the rollup from Berlin so we had this time 2. Felix brought again the 3D-printer, so we had a good equipped booth. During the 2 days of the conference we had a lot of conversations with people and handed out a lot of DVD. There was not so many visitors as in the years before, FrOSCon is one of the events you dont see how many are there as there areal for the event is a huge one. There are people you dont see the whole day as they sitting in one of the DevRooms during the day. I was very often on FrOSCon but as always I didnt hear any talk, I never heard one there, isnt that crazy? On the end FrOSCon was a nice event as always and I am looking forward for its 10th edition.